Background

In 2025, the Mobile Apps team scaled Year in Review to both apps, with a focus on both engagement, and donations. On iOS, an A/B ran that tested showing personalization to logged-out users. On Android, an A/B test ran that offered a Year in Review reading list. The most noticeable and impressive results were surrounding account creation: Year in Review is a compelling reason to create an account, and stay logged-in all year. Supporting data:

• On iOS, requiring an account to view personalization increased the share of logged-in users by 50%. (12% in control vs 8% in variant)
• For the month of December in 2025, new account creation on Android increased by 116% YOY and iOS has increased by 166% compared to December 2024. Before the YiR bump in 2025-12 we were seeing a slight decline month over month for new account create events.

Main learnings from the 2025 Year in Review:

• Requiring an account to view personalized Year in Review makes it a powerful driver of account creation
• Showing personalization to logged-out users dramatically improves overall outcomes
• Year in Review can continue to be a sustainable source of donations for the apps
• Year in Review has strong potential to increase the visibility and brand awareness for Wikipedia and the Mobile Apps

Top-requested improvements from users in the post feature survey:

• More statistics / personalization
• Improved sharing
• Interactive/immersive design
• Cross-platform support

Actions to take in 2026 based on 2025 results:

• Offer partial personalization to logged-out users while requiring an account to unlock deeper insights, in order to capture both the engagement lift from personalization and the account creation motivation.
• Explore a more interactive and visually immersive design and sharing option that makes non-users interested to download the app and create an account
• Test retention-focused feature within Year in Review Explore cross-platform readership insights and donation recognition
• Manually input translations for key account-creation growth languages

Annual Plan tie-in

This work fits under Key Result: DE 3.3 Increase by 50% the number of monthly active reader accounts created in 2026-26 Q1 and Q2 compared to that period in the previous fiscal year

Hypotheses

• If we release an improved Year in Review on both apps, we'll see a 50% increase the number of monthly active reader accounts in the experiment period compared to baseline

How we'll measure success

3-day leading indicator check

• 0.1 - Full page announcement was displayed to 95% of active users
• 0.2 - 20% of logged-out views of announcement begin creating an account
• 0.3 - 34% account creation success rate

20-day analysis

Key results

• 1.1 50% increase the number of monthly active reader accounts in the experiment period compared to baseline

Guardrails

• 2.1 At least 30% account creation success rate
• 2.2 New accounts created through Year in Review retain at the same or higher rate as other entry points

Curiosities

• 3.1 How many people shared their slides or highlights?
• 3.2 How many new installs came in through socials or product marketing? What share of new accounts were also new installs? What was the retention rate of this segment?
• 3.3 What are the main themes we’re seeing in feedback

Overall feature requirements / user stories

Early prompt in Activity
T430224: [Sub-epic] Year in Review: Year-End Reading Challenge

Entry point in activity
User story: As a user of the app, I want to be able to find Year in Review in a place that makes sense to me, such as the activity tab, so that I can explore it and revisit it whenever I want to.

• Move permanent entry point into Activity
• Show active badge on Activity once Year in Review is ready

Full-screen announcement for existing/data-rich users
User story: As a Wikipedia app user, I want to be notified when my Year in Review is ready, so that I know to go view it and don't miss the experience
As a logged-out user with local data, I want to see a teaser of my personalized Year in Review so that I'm motivated to create an account to unlock the full experience.

• Introduce personalized year in review
• Log-in prompt if they are logged-out, motivating log-in for THIS year

Full-screen announcement for new/low-data users
User story: As a Wikipedia app user, I want to be notified when my Year in Review is ready, so that I know to go view it and don't miss the experience

• Introduce collective year in review
• Log-in prompt if they are logged-out, motivating log-in for NEXT year

Collective flow for low-data & logged-out users
User story: As a brand new app user with no local reading history, I want to explore how the world read Wikipedia this year, so that I feel the scale and relevance of Wikipedia even before I've built my own history.
As a user who chooses not to log in or create an account when prompted. I want to still be able to view the collective Year in Review, so I can learn more about Wikipedia's impact this year.

• Show low data users the collective Year in Review
• For logged-out users who do not opt to log-in after prompting, show the collective year in review slides

Personalized flow for data users
New datapoints

• Topics slides
• Rabbit hole slide
• Longest streak

Updating existing datapoints

• Visits
• Saved articles
• Time spent
• Articles
• Edits
• Edit views
• Geography
• Categories
• Reading patterns
• Top articles

Empty states
As a data user who doesn't have enough personal data to populate a specific "Year in Review" slide, I want to see a helpful, contextual empty state for that slide rather than a fallback to collective/aggregate data, so that I know what to do to see a personalized version in the future.

• If a user doesn’t have enough data for one slide a bespoke empty state slide displays where available (does not fallback to Collective)

End screen
User story: As a user who has just finished my Year in Review, I want to land on an ending screen with meaningful follow-up actions so that the experience has a satisfying conclusion and I'm guided toward re-engaging with Wikipedia rather than simply closing the app.

• Give users an ending screen with at least 3 follow-up actions they can take, such as:
  • Sharing highlights & individual slide cards
  • [Data-users only] Explore collective year in review
  • Suggested articles to read (articles mentioned in review for personalized, random articles for collective)
  • Which Wikipedia of the future are you quiz in Webview
  • Modify interests for "Home"
  • Check out the randomizer widget

Refreshed design
User story: As a returning user who experienced Year in Review last year, I want this year's design to look and feel noticeably different, with more immersive visuals and slides I actually want to share, so that opening it feels exciting rather than familiar, and I'm motivated to go through the whole thing again rather than dismissing it as the same feature I've already seen.

• Support Full screen immersive view
• Support at least one Lottie file per slide
• Transition in animation, then text
• Swipe advancing instead of carousel
• Updated placement of Share & Donate
• Must maintain access to FAQ Page

Donor slides
User story: As a donor or editor, I want my Year in Review to acknowledge my contribution so that I feel recognized and valued as part of the Wikipedia community before seeing my specific achievement

• If users have not donated OR edited, show non-contributor version of slide
• If users have donated OR edited, show contributor version of slide
• Let logged-out users know they need to log-in for recognition

Achievements slide
User story: As a contributor who edited or donated between December 1, 2025 and November 30, 2026, I want my Year in Review to recognize my contribution and deliver the reward that was promised to me in December 2025, so that I feel valued, trusted, and motivated to keep

• Provide "Donor 2026" achievement to logged-in users who donated December 1, 2025 - November 30, 2026, as recognized via local app data
• Provide "Editor 2026" achievement to logged-in users who edited December 1, 2025 - November 30, 2026
• Provide "Returning Reader 2026" achievement to logged-in users who read on at least 2 different days December 1, 2025 - November 30, 2026
• Do not show achievements slide to logged-out users
• Only show achievements slide if at least 1 achievement has been unlocked

Achievements in Activity
User story: As an app user, I want to see my earned achievements in the Activity tab, so that I can track my recognition and progress after the annual Year in Review moment and for future goals & challenges.

• Create "First read" achievement, that shows the date of their first article read within the app
• Display each earned badge with its name and a short description
• Tapping a badge (earned or unearned) shows its full requirement and, if earned, the date it was unlocked
• Display an empty state that explains what achievements are and encourages an easy first one to earn (e.g., pointing toward reading, since First Read is the lowest-friction badge).
• Clearing donation history, or reading history should clear achievements related to those
• Logging out should clear editing-related achievements
• Group achievements by type: Reading, Contributions, [future addition] Challenges
• Show 25th birthday reading challenge complete achievement if user has it
• Possible A/B test: hint at the existence of more reading-related achievements with greyed out states

Add cross-platform donor recognition
User story: As a donor want my Year in Review to reflect my donations made elsewhere, so that I feel recognized and receive a contributor reward.

• Logged-out users should not have access to contributor reward, they must log-in
• Logged-in users must be identifiable with their current donor status (Active, lapsed, recurring, recent) from the donor recognition project
• Notify logged-out users that if they have already contributed, they simply need to log in to access recognition.

Translations
User story: As a non-English speaker, I want to experience Year in Review in my native language so that the feature feels relevant and the account creation prompts are easy to understand.

• Request translation of copy doc into top 10 app languages and any identified growth languages from app growth
  • Manually input translations
• Community Relations Specialists requests translation support for project page and support from Translate Wiki Community to translate into interface other languages

Data vs low-data users

• Instead of splitting by logged-in, logged-out, we will split by who has enough data for a compelling personalized year in review, and motivate both groups to log-in if logged-out
  • Low-data user = Not enough data for 2 or more personalized slides
  • Data user = Enough data for 2 or more personalized slides

Nice to Have

Sound
User story: As a user viewing my Year in Review, I want the option to experience the feature with sound, including a Wikipedia sound logo and ambient background audio, so that the review feels like a complete, multi-sensory moment I can choose to opt into.

Interactivity
User story: As a user viewing my Year in Review, I want at least one slide to include an interactive element, such as a quiz question about my reading year, either inline or via a webview, so that the experience feels participatory and memorable rather than purely passive.

Designs

Draft: Figma